"We're definitely sure you'll take your character from Dead Island, the skill tree will be the same, then you can start the game with a bulking monster with a thousand skills," he told Digital Spy.

"We want to make sure the level cap is higher, that you can continue leveling, and you can buy new skills to make them bulkier. In this case, we're sure about that."

Reichert continued: "We know that fans would like to have some of their equipment taken over.

"Right now, it looks like the game design challenges are too big; we don't want the game where the weakest weapon is the impact hammer, then we'd put in more stronger weapons - that'll be insane because people would run around with machine gun rocket launchers or something!

Reichert added: "We're investigating it - maybe we'd give some additional tokens - but we're sure your character and skills will be there, and we have a lot of new equipment. So if you lose your old ones, don't be sad, you'd find even more cool stuff."

Dead Island Riptide will continue directly where the original Dead Island left off, and adds a new playable character and a new island under siege by a monsoon.

It will be available on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC from April 23, 2013 in North America and April 26, 2013 in Europe, and will offer a number of special editions.